The Nature of Pain

I haven’t been posting as much as I would’ve liked because I’ve been feeling lousy, physically, for the past few days. I finally got some over-the-counter meds to treat my symptoms because they were starting to interfere with my daily life. I’ve gone to work but ignored my writing, and now I’ve got deadlines coming up.

Pain is a strange thing. I never used to take OTC drugs for anything, not even for the migraines that would completely incapacitate me as a kid. When I go online and read these health sites though, they always reassure us that we don’t have to live with pain, that there is medication for (almost) everything. It worries me that we should treat the symptoms and not the causes. Some sites do say that regular exercise and a healthy diet will prevent many ailments, but how many people actually follow those guidelines?

I was really taken with two quotes from Pope John Paul II that appeared in a recent issue of Newsweek: “The pope must suffer so that every family and the world should see that there is, I would say, a higher gospel: the gospel of suffering …” and “Suffering seems to belong to man’s transcendence. It is one of those points in which man is in a certain sense ‘destined’ to go beyond himself.” Although I do not consider myself particularly religious, I still admire the way the pope has handled his pain.

Women in Iraq

I finally got around to reading last week’s issue of Newsweek and found the article “Iraq’s Hidden War” discouraging and depressing. The article is about violence that has been perpretrated against Iraqi women as Islamist extremists struggle for control of the country. Women activists have been murdered. Women who appear in public without veils have been attacked. I find it hard to believe that this sort of violence didn’t occur during Saddam’s reign, but the article claims that prewar Iraq “had a good record on women’s rights, at least by the standards of the region.”

Some Recommendations

Encylopedia Neurotica, by Jon Winokur, looks promisingly funny with definitions like the ones below:

Cliches

I was trying to figure out if I was guilty of using a cliche in an article I’m writing when I came across a cute site, PoliticalCliches.com.

Revolution in Lebanon

Don’t know much about Lebanon? Me neither. Read about the “cedar revolution”–also referred to as the “Gucci revolution”–that’s occurring in the country right now on the BBC Web site.